Realising the post-modern dream: Strengthening post-conflict resilience and the promise of peace

Strengthening the resilience of societies is increasingly becoming the key international organisational policy strategy for addressing situations of fragility and post-conflict and for rectifying the shortcomings of liberal peace approaches, considered to lack respect for local needs and values. By focusing on facilitating resilience, governance approaches are thus moving away from top-down liberal peace models to experiment with long-term, iterative and relational processes, respectful of local alterity. By analytically capturing this shift, this article argues that resilience approaches are increasingly adopting the ethico-political sensibilities of critical understandings of liberal peace, which over the last decade have reclaimed hybrid forms of peace, open to difference. In highlighting the resemblance between policy approaches and academic critiques of liberal peace, two implications are considered: first, the need to reappraise critical approaches that are facilitating current shifts in policy strategy; second, the need to reconsider whether resilience and hybrid peace approaches merely rationalise the failures of international peace-building.